Sage is a surface
The specification calls it the primary colour, and it fails as text, under white and under the forest ink. Its own primary button is forest with white at nearly twelve to one — which is the answer hiding in the question.
Design preset
A palette taken from plant matter
Forest, sage, clay and stone on rice paper — warm neutrals only, so one cool grey would read as a different page. Pills rather than rectangles, thin borders, and enough quiet that a single illustration carries a whole section.
2.79:1Sage as text
11.92:1White on forest
5.39:1The deeper sage
0Cool greys
Three rules
Every neutral is warm
Paper, stone, clay and panel are all tinted. Drop one cool grey in among them and it reads as a different stylesheet rather than as a neutral.
The paper has tooth
A fractal grain at three and a half per cent. Without it the warm off-white is a flat tint; with it the page is a sheet, which is the whole premise.
Where each colour works
4.01:1Forest ink on sage — still short of AA at this size
7.81:1Forest ink on clay — comfortable
11.92:1Paper on forest — the button pairing
Sage is the only one of the three that cannot carry body text in either direction. That is not a flaw in the colour — it is a statement about which job it is for.
Three tiers
Placeholder figures — not an offer
Frequently asked
Is this a mock-up or the real thing?
A specimen, hand-built to the preset's specification so the style can be seen whole
rather than as a thumbnail. The preset itself is a set of WordPress Theme Settings, and a
generated site carries the paper, the forest ink, the pills, the stone borders and the type
pairing. The leaf shapes, the herbarium plate and the paper grain are markup, so a section
that wants them still asks for them.
Why is sage not the button colour?
Because it fails in all three directions — as text on the paper, under white and under
the forest ink. It is a beautiful surface and a poor role, and the specification's own
primary button already used forest, which is the giveaway.
Why pills rather than rounded rectangles?
Because nothing in a herbarium has a square corner. A pill reads as grown rather than
cut, which is the one shape decision that carries the whole register.
Build a site in this preset.
Describe the business and your own AI agent builds it on WordPress with Unyson+ — real page-builder pages, with this design system applied site-wide.